WANDERING WOMB | Cassandra Myers

WANDERING WOMB

“It was believed by Hippocrates that a woman's womb, without ‘normal’ sexual activity, would dislodge and wander, to rest on the brain, resulting in hysteria”

They call us Nomads.

Outcasts.

Barely Human.

An Animal Within An Animal.

Cavernous.

Carnivorous.

Wet and Writhing.

Womanhood Gone Wild.

Went For a Walk in The Woods.

And Never Came Back.

I am the wolf that swallowed the woman in me.

And now I salivate at women in red.

Stealing the wives of good men.

Me, the forced wives of all men.

Setting my own skirts on fire.

Sewing suits by candlelight.

Crime of cross-dressing

Of pelvic mania

My desire - an upside down cross.

My gender - off its leash

Running with the boys -

Mudborn. Dirt by nature.

I dig my soles into masculinity’s hard earth

and escape in my father’s footsteps.

Only to be caught by my body's red ritual

Sniffed out by its shedding skin

Cut me open.

Find nothing childlike.

Only my gender licking its wounds.

Force twisted pleasure

with gloved hands.

Phallic instruments.

Murderous texts.

Pathologize me and make me pay

for your services. For your pills and

professional opinion on

my body, your dissertation.

Make a career out of my blood.

Your doctoral thesis wins

a nobel prize for discovering

what I’ve known all along.

Columbusing my red sea.

Coax the femme out of me with smelling salts.

Smoke the queer out with ghost peppers.

Bind me to the stake and watch

my innards flee north.

“It was believed in the third stage of hysteria, patients grew violent. Patients grew violent. Known to attack men and dogs”

Or...

known to attack men

as dogs.

In the light of the harvest

moon. Our lovers dump blood

from their emptying cavities

then slaughter the master’s favourite

hunting dog and

we rise.

Haunches first.

Silver bulletproof beasts.

Children of the moon.

Come to steal the morning.

Take back the night.

We do not wander.

We hunt.

We are coming for your belly.

To slice a crescent moon with my canines.

An artful C-Section.

Vengeful disembowelment.

We give the orders now doctor.

Our first command is:

Run.

Cassandra Myers (they/she), a queer, non-binary, brown, mad, survivor, writes through her threaded intersections with a focus on detangling. The Canadian Festival of Spoken Word Champion 2019 and CUPSI 2018 Best Poet, Cassandra has been performing within spoken word and slam poetry spaces for over six years. A MSW candidate at York University, Cassandra is applying narrative therapeutic practises within their work as a social service provider and an arts activist.